I Will Though...

Well now you see, here's the problem: earlier this week, Racing Victoria's Chief Steward, Terry Bailey - a nice young man who has aged visibly in recent years - was shot at, in his family home. Well, I suppose you could say his family was shot at, or his family home was shot into.

It is very unclear to me who might have done this regardless of rumour and innuendo concerning arguments with local identities.

Half Moon Street -
underhanded things went on there

Horse racing has never been free from incidents and criminality and even violence from time to time too, but that is what seems to attend anything where large amounts of money are involved. 

There is no way nowadays that the Australian racing industry can escape being part of the world racing scene. That is just a fact of modern life. 

But Australian horse racing is not quite the same as what goes on in England, in particular. I have said that before. There is a cynicism that I have observed in English horse racing in which the welfare of the animals is, to me, at least, superficial whenever it conflicts with a financial aim that someone has conceived.

Australian jockeys, when they 'pull' a horse - and they can and do, I'm not saying they don't ever - do not exhibit the kind of brutal viciousness that I have witnessed English jockeys exhibit. It's almost as if the English jockeys need to make it abundantly clear to whoever paid the money, that indeed they were 'doing the job' as it were, that they were paid to do.

The English racing industry is, I'm afraid, riddled with criminality that is virtually never apprehended by the authorities... why? Or why not? Well, it's positively condoned, as far as I'm concerned. Big money in Europe is a sneering, clever-dick, kind of underhanded and arrogant attitude thing. I don't like it. It doesn't impress me. 

And so for me, if you bring big European and Middle Eastern money into town here in Australia, for horse racing, you will bring with it, all the same things it entails 'over there.'

I have not seen, not for many a long year, a cleverer, more audacious and brash, as well as brutal exhibition of horse race fixing, than what I witnessed today in the Melbourne Cup of 2015. 

Remember this?

And I doubt whether the real story will ever come out. 

And all of the people involved were from overseas, and simply none of the Australian riders were involved and if you read some of the post race reports from the jockeys, there are questions that have to be asked - and probably won't ever be - about what those jockeys meant when they used phrases like: 'do I get a prize for staying on...'

Now that phrase can mean two things; it can mean being able to stay on during a bumping or rough incident in the race - or it can mean 'getting off a horse' that you were originally booked to ride but had to stand down for because a foreign jockey was meant to get on, and pull the horse up during the race. In other words, if you 'stayed on' you didn't pull your horse up and were honest, and deserved a prize. Trust me, jockeys are as good as the best barrister at diplomacy or legalistic double-speak. Oh they know what they meant all right. It has to do with a jockey who got off a horse so that another, foreign jockey could pilot it.

In these big money industries, people are often warned to shut their mouths. And these warnings can come from the authorities themselves sometimes by way of fines or suspensions or threats thereof.

Frankie Dettori was fined and suspended. But I didn't see him do anything. He is not the jockey I am thinking of who has questions to answer.

I am not in a position to know who is ultimately the villain here, but one question that I have is this - would Racing Victoria risk its own future with international visitors by laying down the law to them over what went on in today's Melbourne Cup? I doubt it.

She knows how to ride a two-mile race all right.
Here she is with the late Bart Cummings, greatest
ever Melbourne Cup trainer. She won on merit.
Nothing wrong with what she did. It was the other things
that went on in the race that are troubling.

As far as I'm concerned, questions remain over today's race, and I know that what I believe will never ever ever be discussed in the public and people have too many ways of covering it up after the event so to speak.

I have not bet on the Melbourne Cup in recent years because of various problematic factors that I believe have developed over this race during that time. And they're not going to change any time soon because Racing Victoria is convinced it needs to pamper the foreigners with all of their vast wealth and so on.

Big money can be very exciting, but it can often not be, um, wholesome of a thing.

Horse racing in Europe is not about always winning, as much as it is about breeding, and doing 'secret' and 'funny' deals with rich people 'in the know.' It's all planned a long time ahead. And I don't approve. They should keep their schemes away from public events.

I mean, why is winning important to people who are so wealthy, they have their own private race tracks, BETTER than anything anywhere in the world, and where they hold PRIVATE races, where there IS NO GAMBLING? It isn't - not the way you or I understand 'winning.'

There's a clue in this pic from the Bond movie
about crooked racing in Europe - but
probably only knowledgeable modern racing
people will get it 

That is to say, they aren't going to gamble with ME OR YOU, because we ain't rich enough. And they couldn't care less about the ordinary public when it comes to whatever scheme they are carrying out. I know I talk some cryptic mambo-jumbo a lot but how could you possibly not think that the Chief Race Course and Racing Steward being shot at during the week of the Melbourne Cup has literally no connection with or bearing on the outcome of that race? It's insane to think not. I am a long-term - a very long-term racing man. I've owned winning race horses. The only horses I've ever owned in fact were city winning horses - which tells you I know something about the game. I did not bet on this race although I had been given information which turned out to have been very accurate. And I saw something during the running of the race which I did not like. I told you about the cynicism of the foreign owners and trainers weeks before this race. 

What can I possibly say? The authorities will say nothing and they will pretend nothing happened and they will get away with it because the public only knows what they are told to 'know' by the general media. But it was absolutely pathetic and every horseman knows it.

Why these people do this kind of thing I really cannot fathom on an intellectual basis even though I get the point the rich and powerful people do whatever the hell they want any time they want. I get that. It's a pretty sad morality though. I don't care how much money they have or their fame; these are not not people I want to know. It's a shame they are treated as equals on Australian racetracks. But then, for how much longer?